Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  Enemy fire melted some of the barriers between the Japanese American soldiers and their Caucasian officers. As the 442nd approached the Arno River, Hajiro saw a Caucasian military police officer in a street fight with an Italian. The short-tempered Hajiro joined the fray, throwing punches in defense of “someone I would never have helped if I had seen the same fight in New York City.”10 He was court-martialed for fighting with a civilian. It was his second conviction.

  His first court-martial had come during training, when he fought with a cook who had refused to save some food until Hajiro completed his shift watching German prisoners harvest peanuts. He had hated life at Camp Shelby, especially the chiggers and poison ivy. He had been a messenger because of his running ability. Hajiro was heartbroken when his first court-martial included a transfer from friends in Company M to strangers in Company I and assignment as a BAR man for good measure. Now, after two months of fighting in Italy, Hajiro defended Caucasian police officers with his fists at the edge of enemy territory.

  After crossing the Arno River on September 6, Okubo, Hajiro, and the rest of the 442nd had been pulled off the line. The bloodied regiment arrived in Naples by land and sea. They had been transported north to engage the retreating Germans and had driven them another forty miles back to the far side of the Arno River, near Florence, at an exorbitant price. Nearly 25 percent of the 442nd—more than twelve hundred men—had been killed or wounded in less than three months’ fighting.

  Replacements from Camp Shelby had soon joined them. Sometimes a replacement reminded a battle veteran of a buddy he had seen killed or carted off the battlefield only days earlier. One replacement was George Sakato. Named after a samurai, he had endured a sickly childhood while growing up in Colton, a railroad town in citrus country east of Los Angeles, at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. It seemed he caught every cold and flu bug, while his parents ran a pool hall and bathhouse (three tubs in a room behind two barber chairs).

  Sakato hadn’t been interested in much more than lunch and football as a boy. He had been held back a year in school, partly because he liked to ditch school with a friend and drive to Santa Monica or San Diego and then return by the end of the school day. After barely graduating high school, he went to work in a butcher shop. On December 7, 1941, he had turned on the shop’s radio and learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Oh my god, now what are we going to do?” he had asked no one in particular.11

  He had tried to volunteer for the air corps six months earlier but ended up in the army. The thirty-day trip to Europe had wrenched his gut continuously.

  ON SEPTEMBER 25, OKUBO, HAJIRO, SAKATO, AND THOUSANDS of men boarded four troop transports in the Naples harbor. A small cadre of destroyers stood at anchor nearby, their crews building up steam for imminent departure. The weather had turned angry, the roiling sea pitching the armada to one side, then the other. For many like Sakato, the seasickness they had endured between America and Europe returned in an instant as they headed toward France.

  Once they landed near Marseille, they loaded onto cramped and wet boxcars that carried the 442nd north into a land of destruction. Years of German occupation, followed by the American assault from the French Riviera, had turned a serene land of forests, farms, and countless villages—each with a steeple that had dominated the community’s horizon and life for centuries—into a gray, barren, and charred landscape.

  It had become a broken land. Mangled vehicles, shattered farm carts, and bloated animals turned black by fall’s rain and cold littered farm fields. Those fields still in production had been stripped of their wheat and corn. Many trees in the blocks of forest that often separated one field from another had been sheared off high above the ground by artillery air bursts. Stone barns that had stood for generations now opened to the sky, their roofs collapsed and blackened by direct artillery strikes.

  It was a land that had been gutted by war, its energy drained by endless destruction. As the 442nd approached Epinal, on the Moselle River, foothills rose from the farming country. Here, the ridges became more pronounced and farm fields more compact, as the Vosges Mountains began to dominate the landscape. On October 15 the 442nd detrained and reentered combat, joining the campaign to capture two key railroad towns, Bruyères and Belmont, on the drive toward the German border.

  Men in the 442nd again demonstrated remarkable bravery in a new kind of war. Italy’s expansive terrain had given way to dense and darkened French forests. Combat bordered on hand-to-hand among the trees. Mud and relentless rain made trench foot a potential enemy. Suffocating cloud cover was another, preventing air support when the 442nd needed it most. Yet time and time again, the 442nd achieved its objectives, often on the backs of individual bravery.

  The day after Bruyères fell, Hajiro stood sentry duty on an embankment when the ground around him exploded with sniper fire. Rather than dive for cover, Hajiro intentionally drew more enemy fire to his exposed position so others could spot the Germans’ location. Hajiro managed to shoot 2 snipers and enabled the unit on his right to eliminate the rest of the German threat. Someone in Hajiro’s unit marveled at his bravery and later jotted down a few notes, describing his feat. A few days later, Hajiro and another soldier had dug in to protect their platoon’s right flank. They heard German voices. They waited as the voices approached. Hajiro took a deep, calming breath before he ambushed the 18-man enemy patrol. He killed 2, wounded another, and took 15 prisoners, nearly single-handedly.

  After nine days of combat and the recent ridge attack, the 442nd had looked forward to several days’ rest. The regiment had lost one-third of its fighting strength since arriving near Bruyères. One company in the 100th Battalion had only 15 men left, compared to an authorized strength of approximately 180. Its commander and all its platoon leaders had been killed or wounded. On October 24 the 442nd needed to regroup, resupply, and maybe enjoy a hot shower in nearby Laval.

  A FEW MILES TO THE EAST, MARTIN HIGGINS AND THE REST OF the 1/141 climbed out of their foxholes on the morning of October 24. Bone-weary men stretched as the forest lightened. Most had tried to sleep in shallow craters scraped between roots and rocks. They had dozed in wet uniforms, made stiff by caked mud and minor wounds. An invisible enemy waited, perhaps within shouting distance. The lead scouts in all three companies would have to separate innocent forest features from enemy positions. A gray boulder barely visible through the trees ahead might conceal a sniper. A shallow ravine would be good cover for a machine-gun team. A nearly invisible game trail may be laced with land-mine tripwires. They would know with certainty when they stood, fully exposed, and advanced toward their enemy’s crosshairs.

  Colonel Oran Stovall, commanding officer of the 36th Division’s 111th Engineer Battalion, had already scouted the planned route of advance and didn’t like what he had found. The narrow ridge posed significant logistical problems for those units that would be following the 1st Battalion. “I took Lieutenant Beahler and an infantry patrol of four men to make recon[noiter] of the area,” Stovall wrote later. “I started with one man on the trail in front of me, one on either flank and Beahler and one man in the rear as getaway men. The underbrush became so thick the flankers could not keep up so I pulled them into the road.” Although Dahlquist had told him, “There are no ‘bosch’ [Germans] up there,” Stovall’s patrol came under long-range enemy artillery fire. Surely, there had to be at least some German spotters in the forest. “I then reported to the General [Dahlquist] . . . that the attack could be supported if nothing larger than a light tank company was involved.”12

  Companies B and C took the lead, with Company A trailing by about five hundred yards. Again the forest seemed too quiet. More than 250 men crept forward, from tree to tree, scanning the forest ahead for unnatural or inconsistent movements, shapes, colors, and lines, knowing that almost nothing in nature is truly horizontal or vertical. Sight lines changed with every soft step and by the slightest crouch. The dense underbrush forced squads onto game trails and nearly invisible path
s. They advanced, slowly, and found only enemy litter. “The trail was littered with all sorts of German equipment—guns, helmets, gas masks, packs—that they [had] discarded on the way,” recalled Sergeant Bill Hull. “We didn’t know the Germans were as strong as they were because all that discarded equipment gave our battalion commander the wrong idea about their strength.”13

  At one point during the advance, enemy fire confused the 1st Battalion. It appeared someone in street clothes was firing at the advancing units. Were French civilians firing at the Americans? Frantic radio traffic to regimental headquarters indicated that it appeared members of the French Resistance were attacking the 1st Battalion. The French Resistance, called the FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur), was critical to Allied operations as they pushed through France in 1944. FFI members wore civilian clothes and carried their own weapons in guerrilla campaigns against the Germans. It didn’t make sense that the FFI was now attacking the Allies. Division headquarters responded, speculating the enemy fire may be coming from French civilians who supported the Germans. Or perhaps it was from Germans wearing civilian clothes. Regardless, all three companies of the 1/141 were taking serious enemy fire toward the end of the long ridge, miles from the nearest reinforcements.

  By midday they had advanced nearly another mile and had passed Col de la Croisette, a critical crossroads of trails with the main logging road. It would have been a perfect place for the Germans to ambush the Americans. About eight hours later, Companies A and C were nearing the end of the ridge that overlooked the valley below. Company B was a short distance behind. Incredibly, they had advanced nearly six miles from the point where they had left the Belmont valley and had climbed up on the ridge. There had been some German resistance, but in a little more than twenty-four hours they had nearly reached an objective that had looked ominously distant on the briefing map.

  But then the forest exploded with enemy fire. Men fell as Company A’s Higgins and Company C’s Kimble yelled orders over the sounds of gunfire to fall back as Huberth’s Company B caught up.

  By this time Dahlquist had arrived at regimental headquarters, several miles to the west. He had told regimental command not to worry about counterattacks by Germans approaching the ridge from the northeast. He had the 3rd Infantry Regiment in place to prevent that. But Higgins’s, Kimble’s, and Huberth’s men were taking fire from multiple directions. Lieutenant Colonel Bird ordered light tanks forward. Within minutes Bird’s command post shuddered as German artillery began pounding his location. Not only were the three companies on the point taking serious fire, but now the battalion’s command post more than a mile to the rear was under attack. Bird asked Dahlquist for more tanks as the fighting intensified.

  Dahlquist had planned for the 1/141 to dig in for the night at 1700 hours. But the Germans’ attack unraveled the general’s plans. Radio communications had been sporadic during the surprise attack. He didn’t know how many casualties the three companies had suffered. Regimental and division headquarters would have to wait for a radioman at the far end of the ridge to report how many men had been killed, whether any were missing, and how many men lay wounded on litters or the ground.

  Tanks had been brought forward, but the forest was so dense that they provided little support. Largely for the same reason, American artillery could do little to suppress enemy fire where the 1/141 had been ambushed. Engineers were repairing and strengthening the eroded logging road so reinforcements and supplies could be brought forward, but that was going to take some time. Dahlquist’s tactical options were limited. A single battalion had advanced too far and too fast in a dense old-growth forest that gave every advantage to the defenders, some of whom had been dug in for weeks, waiting.

  At about 1615 radio traffic ceased for perhaps two hours, as the three companies dug in for the night. It was a perfect time for the Germans to launch a concentrated attack. An enemy force moved into the forest along a trail to the northeast. They attacked Huberth’s and Kimble’s companies near Hill 645. Higgins’s Company A moved forward to join the fight. While the 3rd Infantry Regiment may have protected the 1st Battalion’s northern flank, the enemy had launched the attack from the valley to the south. At about the same time, German artillery pounded the 1st Battalion’s command post, several miles to the west. Now Dahlquist faced the prospect of the 1st Battalion being decimated. As the forest darkened, the enemy had herded the 1/141 onto a single hilltop, and its artillery had forced the 1/141’s command post to retreat farther away from Higgins’s, Huberth’s, and Kimble’s men. Dahlquist needed a situation report from the far end of the ridge.

  Meanwhile, Higgins, Kimble, and Huberth gathered their forces on a relatively sparsely wooded hilltop. One of their first priorities was to create an aid station in the relatively flat forest that offered no natural cover other than trees. A crater would have to be dug, large enough for several men, to give medics and the wounded some semblance of protection from enemy fire and the elements. A night’s brutal cold could prove deadly to the wounded. Perhaps the wounded could be evacuated in the dark? Three teams of litter bearers were sent in the general direction of where the battalion’s command post had been. They were attacked and returned to the three companies’ position, along with the wounded they carried.

  The battalion’s next priority was resupply. A day’s fighting had depleted ammo, and soldiers generally didn’t carry much more than a day’s worth of food. Called K rations, they consisted mostly of canned food, biscuits, dried coffee, and cigarettes.

  Another small patrol was dispatched, in search of a potential supply route that might have escaped the Germans’ notice. They met enemy resistance almost immediately and returned. Was the 1/141 fully cut off? Higgins sent a third patrol to be sure. When two men stepped on land mines, the remainder returned. Resupply routes were blocked, and the number of wounded men was mounting by the hour. Higgins knew the three companies were trapped near the far end of the ridge.

  The situation was dire. The surrounded battalion had no immediate prospect of retreat, and the position of any potential reinforcements was unknown. They had been isolated on a hill with the enemy on three sides, pinning them against a steep drop-off. Battalion and division commands knew their location, so they weren’t lost in a literal sense. But they stood a very good chance of being lost as casualties or perhaps as prisoners of war. If the 1/141 could not be relieved quickly, Dahlquist would have to mount a rescue mission if he was to avoid losing an entire battalion in the dash toward Germany.

  That night the men of the 1/141 sat, lay, or crouched in a relatively thinly wooded area on the ridge that overlooked the German-held valley to the south. Higgins had already lost ten men who had been killed by the enemy. Germany artillery during the coming night would kill three more.

  Not far away was a primitive crossing known as Le Trapin des Saules. In local slang it meant “Trap of the Willows.” According to a German soldier who had been captured, the Germans knew the Americans’ battle plan. The advance along a narrow ridge had been an ideal opportunity to trap any American unit by lying in wait and then closing in behind it. The trap had been executed perfectly by the Germans. They now had a battalion in their grip.

  Higgins’s men who weren’t wounded were exhausted. Their final message that night to division command summed up their plight: “No rations, no water, no communications with battalion headquarters, four litter cases.”14

  The Germans had allowed them to advance too far in front of the rest of the 36th Division. Then at dusk they had closed in behind 275 American soldiers and cut them off from headquarters and resupply. Higgins, Huberth, and Kimble could only speculate when the next enemy attack would come.

  a The VI Corps comprised the 3rd, 36th, and 45th Infantry Divisions. The 36th comprised the 141st, 142nd, and 143rd Infantry Regiments as well as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Each regiment was organized into three infantry battalions, plus supporting engineer, medical, and artillery units.

  b Each infantry ba
ttalion is organized into four companies. Each company is composed of platoons, which in turn are organized into squads.

  c A slit trench was the length of a man’s body, shoulder width, and perhaps eighteen to twenty-four inches deep. It enabled him to lie flush with the ground, presumably out of sight and somewhat protected from shrapnel.

  d Hills and high points on military maps were named for their elevation. Along with precise coordinates and the twenty-four-hour clock, numbers were the universal language of military strategists.

  e Japanese Americans constituted 40 percent of Hawaii’s population. They were not forcibly relocated, as they were seen as less of a threat in view of the massive military presence in Hawaii. Plantation owners also vigorously opposed relocation because they relied heavily on Japanese American laborers.

  f The 442nd was divided into multiple units. The Headquarters Company included command, antitank, medical, cannon, service, and officer units as well as the 232nd Combat Engineer Company. The 100th Battalion comprised Companies A–F. The 2nd Battalion comprised Companies E–H. The 3rd Battalion comprised Companies I–M. The 522nd Field Artillery Battalion was also attached to the 442nd.

  CHAPTER 2

  BACK TO THE FRONT

  A SINGLE CANDLE FLICKERED IN THE HORSE STALL OF A BARN NEAR the Bruyères cemetery. The cold air smelled of wet straw and horse manure as ten men held crumpled papers close to their faces. The letters carried them away from the persistent rain to another world. To a place where mothers worried. For some, to a place where wives tended their children. And where the water was hot and where beds held clean sheets. Sergeant John Kashiki read his, eager for news from Mary, his wife of less than two years.

  Kashiki was a member of the 442nd’s cannon company. As a young man he had run the family farm in Holtville in the desert east of San Diego after his father had fallen ill. He was a student at the University of California–Davis studying agronomy and economics when he and his family were sent to a relocation center in Arizona. He had volunteered for the 442nd in 1943 after he married Mary. She was pregnant with their second child when he shipped overseas. When Mary’s thirty letters were handed to him in Bruyères on October 25, he wondered if his daughter, Judi, now had a brother or sister. Mary numbered her daily letters so he could read them in order. The first one reported no birth, quite yet.